IN HIS HANDS: The decision by unlikely S&P big John Chambers, who has a master's in English literature, will have a huge impact on the world economy. Photo: BLOOmberg

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The Wall Street bean counter who trashed America’s global credit reputation is a New Yorker who never studied economics, majored in literature and philosophy, and has a master’s in English lit.

Yet John Chambers, 55, who lives with his wife, daughter and two dogs on Riverside Drive, has became the stern public face of Standard & Poor’s, the private agency that wreaked havoc Friday night by notching down the nation’s credit to double-A from triple-A.

David Beers, S&P’s global head of sovereign ratings, Toronto analyst Nikola Swann and Chambers are the downgraders-in-chief who lowered the boom.

Now the trio is the focus of increasing scrutiny.

As economist and money manager Zachary Karabell said last month, their subjective decisions make them “emperors” wearing “very frayed robes.”

Chambers grew up outside Kansas City, Kan., and went to liberal Grinnell College in Iowa, where he was a star on the swim team, ranking eighth in school history in the 1,000-meter freestyle.

After graduating in 1977 with a bachelor of arts in literature and philosophy, he went Ivy League, enrolling at Columbia University, where he got a master’s degree in English literature.

His first big job in finance seems to have been in the international department of European-American Bank, where he eventually rose from management trainee to vice president.

But it isn’t clear exactly where Chambers’ path took a sharp turn from a world of books and ideas to one of dollars and cents.

David Wargin, an S&P spokesman, told The Post that Chambers, a chartered financial analyst, chairs the agency’s sovereign-rating committee, made up of “senior sovereign analysts” with various backgrounds.

But Wargin wouldn’t say whether the committee was in disagreement over the US downgrade, Chambers declined to be interviewed for this story, and his wife backed her man, telling The Post, “I go on the wisdom of the people involved, including my husband.”

What is known is that Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch, the so-called “big three” of credit-rating agencies, wield enormous power. Their assessments on bonds or tradable debt are, officially, the last word on the subject — and have been since the early 1970s.

Oddly, S&P’s US downgrade was a departure from its rivals — both of whom reaffirmed the triple-A rating last week when President Obama inked the debt-ceiling increase into law.

S&P was found to have made an estimated $2 trillion error in its 10-

year deficit projection but brushed that aside, citing instability in Washington and the fact that the deficit-reduction cuts fell short of S&P’s recommended $4 trillion.

Warren Buffett, for one, thinks S&P got it wrong. The United States, the billionaire investor yesterday told Bloomberg TV, merits a “quadruple-A” rating. The Oracle of Omaha also predicted that the nation would avoid another recession.

S&P dates back to 1860, when Henry Poor published “The History of Railroads and Canals in the United States,” a compilation of financial and operational information.

In 1906, Luther Lee Blake created the Standard Statistic Bureau, which culled data on nonrailroad companies. The two merged in 1941. McGraw-Hill acquired the firm in 1966, and it has since expanded into financial-informational services.